Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - Bitcoin Surge, AI Job Loss, & 2024 AGI Predictions w/ Salim Ismail | EP #89

Episode Date: March 7, 2024

In this episode, Peter and Salim dive into the Gemini scandal, Sora’s release, Bitcoin surging, and when we’ll finally have AGI.  Salim Ismail is a serial entrepreneur and technology strategist well known for his expertise in Exponential organizations. He is the Founding Executive Director of Singularity University and the founder and chairman of ExO Works and OpenExO.  Join Salim’s OpenExO Community Sophie's Epic Space Mission ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:  Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ Use my code PETER25 for 25% off your first month's supply of Seed's DS-01® Daily Synbiotic: seed.com/moonshots  ProLon is the first Nutri-technology company to apply breakthrough science to optimize human longevity and optimize longevity and support a healthy life. Get started today with 15% off here: https://prolonlife.com/MOONSHOT _____________ Get my new Longevity Practices 2024 book: https://bit.ly/48Hv1j6  Join my executive summit, Abundance360: https://www.abundance360.com/summit  I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Imagine being the first person to ever send a payment over the internet. New things can be scary, and crypto is no different. It's new, but like the internet, it's also revolutionary. Making your first crypto trade feels easy with 24-7 support when you need it. Go to Kraken.com and see what crypto can be. Not investment advice. Crypto trading involves risk of loss. See Kraken.com slash legal slash ca dash pru dash disclaimer

for info on Kraken's undertaking to register in Canada. This episode is brought to you by Secret. Secret deodorant gives you 72 hours of clinically proven odor protection free of aluminum, parabens, dyes, talc, and baking soda. It's made with pH- pH balancing minerals and crafted with skin conditioning oils. So whether you're going for a run or just running late, do what life throws your way and smell like you didn't. Find Secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. Everybody, Peter here with Moonshots and WTF just happened this week in technology with Celine Ismael.

You know, I'm constantly saying I don't watch the news, but this is the news I do watch. It's what's happening technology and a lot's just happened this week. So strap in, get ready and let's jump in. There's about 500 trillion worth of wealth in the world and I don't see why Bitcoin can't represent more and more of that. The Bitcoin breakout, it boomed today. Bitcoin crosses a new all-time high. By any measure, these are the most successful ETF launches of all time.

This is likely to go much, much higher. I think we're just at the beginning of this explosion. Everybody, Peter here. Welcome to Moonshots. I'm here with the amazing salim ismail and this is wtf just happened in tech this week salim so we've got a lawsuit between elon and open ai you know i don't know about you but i think uh we're going to spend more on legal bills than we should be. We should be spending it on tech instead. So as much as I think Elon has every right to sue, I think that, you know, he should have taken action a lot sooner than he actually is doing right now. What do you think about it? Yeah, you know, I kind of take his side a bit on this.

He put, what, 50 or 100 million into open ai to create open uh truly open and safe ai and it's gone 180 degrees the other direction so if he's feeling miffed i think he has every right to be my challenge my i listen i agree with it it's neither open nor uh is it a non-profit and that was the intention um but my question is why is he taking action now why didn't he take action when it occurred three years ago or whenever it happened that's a good question i think maybe he just got you know his anger tends to build up over time timing of his kind of actions is never quite a perfect fit with what's actually going on.

I think the ship has sailed, as you said, but if you've spent a lot of time and effort helping build something and then they went totally the opposite way, you'd be feeling pretty miffed if you were him. So I totally understand the sentiment. I agree. I mean, I love love the articles are coming out saying actually the reason elon is doing this is he wants to know what elia saw when they fired sam and they want to bring that out in the court of law so that's interesting that's very viable as well there's definitely something happened there that's not come yet to light and it's worth looking into. I wish I knew.

We have one of our alumna from Singularity University that was on the board, but I won't go there. You know, you and I flipped Singularity University from a non-profit into a for-profit back in the day. Yeah, and I disagreed with you at the time. The question I have is, you know, Elon suing sam for it uh not remaining a non-profit and for it becoming uh not open but you know grok is not open source is it so this is the dilemma i'm feeling right this second there's definitely that um i think if you put 100 million or whatever the

number was to fund something and then it got flipped around, right? Grok is starting where it is from a private company on a private platform. I also happen to disagree quite a bit with what Elon is doing with Twitter, but it's his and he can do what he wants with it. And I think he's got huge potential to do something amazing with it as we'll cover a little later. But I don't know where to fit. I could sit on either side of that ethical debate. I love Elon, but I got to imagine he's employing as many lawyers as he is engineers these days,

given all that's going on. But let's go beyond this. So I saw this article that came out that sort of blew me away. This is Klarna, his name of the company, announced its AI assistant that's on top of OpenAI. And the AI assistant has had 2.3 million conversations as a customer chatbot. And it's doing the equivalent of 700 full-time agents. I think you sent me this article. Yeah, it surfaced in our community and we kind of looked at it carefully.

Now, it's a bit of a puff piece because it's self-published around that, right? They obviously are promoting and showing their first of the game. But I think it's a harbinger of things to come where there'll be, I think we'll see hundreds of these stories over the next few months as people find radical ways. If you go back to our definition of an exponential organization is how do you radically drop the cost of supply, right? And there's a hundred ways in which AI can take a slice off the cost pie. And this is a great example. Yeah. I mean, listen, the idea of the old press one, if you want to speak to a sales agent and so forth, I mean, the ability to actually

say, listen, I bought this device. It sucks. It's not as advertised. I want a refund. And then have a conversation and then actually get the refund or whatever it might be. Here's their numbers. It is more accurate in errand resolution leading up to 25% drop in repeat inquiries and customers now resolve their issues in two minutes compared to 11 minutes. That's pretty damn good. The part that really blew me away is that it's month one and they're already doing two-thirds of their chest, right? It's not like 5% or 10%. It's like 67%. That's a pretty incredible thing in month one. That's amazing. Now, I think this is one of those where the initial call to customer service was always routing and saying, what are you interested in? And then you can route it to a more senior person, depending on the query. I think AIs are ripe to take over a lot of that. I wonder how this AI does on a deep Indian accent or British accent or German accent or Greek accent. You know, is it able to parse all of these international accents?

But we'll find out. Because if you're calling customer service, you're going to want that comfortable Indian accent to show that you're in the right place. I say that being Indian. So I saw this conversation from Geoffrey Hinton. Geoffrey Hinton is going to be coming to join me at the Abundance Summit this year. And you'll be there at the Abundance Summit this year. Yeah. I'm looking forward to it.

Yeah. It's going to be awesome. I want you to listen to this statement he makes, which kind of blows me away. And I want your opinion on it. which kind of blows me away and I want your opinion on it. What I want to claim is that these millions of features and billions of interactions and features that they learn are understanding what they're really doing, these large language models. They're fitting a model to data.

It's not the kind of model statistics has been thought much about until recently. It's a weird kind of model. It's very big. It has huge numbers of parameters. But it is trying to understand these strings of discrete symbols by features and how features interact. So it is a model. And that's why I think these things are really understanding. And one thing to remember is if you ask, well, how do we understand? Because obviously we think we understand. Well, many of us do anyway. This is the best model we have of how we understand.

So it's not like there's this weird way of understanding that these AI systems are doing. And then there's how the brain does it. The best model we have of how the brain does it is by assigning features to words and having feature interactions. And originally, this little language model was designed as a model of how people do it. So there you go.

Jeffrey Hinton believes that these AIs are, in fact, understanding. That's a pretty bold statement because we just think of the AIs as, you know, extrapolating, interpolating between stuff that we've already said. But if they're really understanding, that is a step towards sentience and consciousness. What do you think about that? So I do, I agree it's remarkable.

I agree it maps onto how human beings do. I don't think of it as a step towards sentience because I go back to the definition we argued about last time. I was, what do you mean by sentience, right? Like a subset of consciousness is self-awareness, and I feel like I'm self-aware, but my wife disagrees. So where do you even start with the conversation? However, I do agree with the understanding part. I'd like to click on that a bit because, you know, if you think about all of our instincts, it's about finding signals from noise. That's everything, right?

And we do it via biological substrate. But if you take the full extent, there's no reason why that substrate has to be wet biological. It could be anything as long as the functionality is there. So if you take it to the full extent, we're biological robots, every emotion in your brain is a subroutine. And so if you run that model and come out from that perspective, this is completely not surprising and unexpected to have happen. If you think about genetic algorithms, they do the same thing. They're tuned and then they learn by themselves and they're adaptably learning. So I think this is a natural function that we expect to see a lot of. I think what's surprising is how good they are, how quickly they

are, because that's the part that I found most fascinating when you talk to the founders, Imad and others of these LLMs, they're blown away by how good they are. Yeah. I mean, we are just complicated machines at the final result, as much as people like to believe something else. So the question is if complexity gets high enough. Now, the interesting thing is going to be whether or not these large AI models start finding insights beyond humans, right? In other words, determining new physics, determining new chemistry, or new insights into biology. I absolutely expect that to happen

because they're going to be better at signal-to-noise than anything that we're focused on, right? Because remember, again, all of our functionality for four billion years of evolution is how to survive and procreate. So what happens when an AI model comes up with a brand new material,

a room temperature superconductor, and it's been invented, who owns it? That's going to be interesting. That's going to be a very interesting question. It's whoever owns the robot. And at some point, the robot's going to go, I want to be my own person. Yeah, but the robot right now, the AI algorithm is, let's say it's GPT-5, but it's my data, but OpenAI and Microsoft say, no, no, it was created on our construct, on our platform. And I'll give you one idea that I'm thinking about, and this is a freebie to any dictator or president of any country out there. Why don't you pass the laws that allow an AI to incorporate a corporation on its incorporating and creating businesses in your country.

And if you just say you can own it, but you have to pay taxes, I think that would be fascinating. That would be fascinating. I think we're going to have a tough time preaching into that model. We're somewhat close to that in the US with LLCs because lots of small companies get created as a shell companies, et cetera. But I think that's a great comment. And I think that'll be a hurdle if we can overcome or when we overcome, whoever does it is going to find a whole brave new world. I think we're going to see, you know, my prediction here, we're in 2024, I think within the next four years by 2028, we'll see some government allowing full incorporation

ownership by an AI of a company that it owns and operates. You know what? I think it may, but they're going to want the human accountability at some level. They want someone to point the finger at. That's right. That's the part where it'll become interesting. By the way, can I make a comment about Jeffrey for a second? Yeah, sure.

Back in 2017 in Toronto, he gave a talk at an event and I went up to him and I talked to him and I asked him, you know, where are we in the spectrum of deep learning? And he said, we've kind of come to the ends of the limitations and that we're kind of reaching the life cycle and deep learning. We need the next breakthrough to take you out to the next level. And I said, what do you think that would be? And he goes, I have no idea. And literally three months later, the transformer paper was launched.

I'm curious when you have them there, you should ask him what's the next step or when do you see the life cycle of LLMs ending? That'd be a great question. Well, you'll be there. Help me ask him, what's the next step? Or when do you see the life cycle of LLMs ending? That'd be a great question. Well, you'll be there. Help me ask him. I'll ask him. Everyone, it's Peter. In a few weeks, I'm gathering an incredible group of AI leaders,

including Ray Kurzweil, Eric Schmidt, Mustafa Saliman, Imad Mustaq, Michael Saylor, and others at my private Abundance Summit to discuss the impact of AI on our lives, Saylor, and others at my private Abundance Summit to discuss the impact of AI on our lives, our businesses, and the world. The Abundance Summit is a private community open to extraordinary moonshot entrepreneurs. It's Singularity University's highest level program, and it's not for everyone. If you're at the top of your game and you want to learn more about this program, click on the link below to be considered

okay let's go back to the episode enjoy all right uh let's move on to the to the next interesting article here um which is a comment by elon let's take a listen what i'm seeing in terms of ai compute is i've never seen any technology advance faster than this. The artificial intelligence compute coming online appears to be increasing by a factor of 10 every six months. Like, obviously, that cannot continue at such a high rate for forever or exceed the best of the universe, but I've never seen anything like it. And this is why you see NVIDIA's market cap being so gigantic,

because they currently have the best neural net chips. I mean, I think NVIDIA's market cap exceeded the GDP of Canada or something recently, and it was quite high. being so gigantic because they currently have the best neural net chips i mean i think the nvidia's market cap exceeded the gdp of canada or something recently anyway it's quite high so yeah you know it may go higher who knows the chip rush is bigger than any gold rush we really are on the edge of probably the biggest technology revolution that has ever existed you know there's supposedly a sort of a chinese curse may you live times. Well, we live in the most interesting of times, the most interesting. So 10X compute increase every six months. Talk about super exponentials. And we haven't even seen quantum hit yet. It's off the charts. I think it's a gold rush. I don't think this

continues. I give it about a one year to 18 month cycle while we flush out this wave. And then it'll stabilize for a bit or people will start. You know, the problem is when you're growing this fast, you don't consolidate, right? And therefore, you risk kind of growing so fast that you get to a point where the whole thing collapses and nobody knows what to do with it. So I think it's important in growth phases like this to take checkpoints and go okay let's stabilize for a bit stock markets always have this pattern of growing and stabilizing growing and stabilizing or whatever we're going to need to see something like that and i think it'll naturally happen but there's no question this completely exploding right now. Yeah, I think we're just at the beginning of this explosion. And again, what we haven't had before,

and we have now for the first time, is self-improving systems. Yeah, with a feedback loop. AI, coding AI, and increasing. I mean, there will be a point at which you want the next generation of chips. Fantastic. What am I going to go to help me design it? I'm going to go help get an AI to help me design my next generation of chips.

Of course. Yeah. I mean, this is what Ray Kurzweil called the law of accelerating returns, right? We've been using faster computers to build the next generation of faster computers, next generation of faster computers to build the next generation faster computers next generation fast computers the the point for me the question for me will be what do you do with all that compute power i think the the the spectrum of problems uh becomes limited over time as to what you can do with it like right now there's a ton on video there's a ton on gaming i want to see the time when we can say hey let's solve the water

scarcity problem yeah but i think i think that is exactly what we do we do it that people just start dreaming bigger and bigger um i i don't know i mean i i think we're also going to start to simulate worlds within worlds right this is this is why i'm so adamant we're living in a in a simulation within a simulation within a simulation yeah this is the transcension hypothesis where which answers fermi's paradox why don't we see alien civilizations out there is because they evolve virtual reality and they go inwards yeah yeah for sure much as the space cadet in me is pissed off about that reality i'm breaking out i'm i'm taking a starship i'm heading heading out by the way speaking of starship um you know it's interesting in this

last week we saw uh intuitive machines land on the moon amazing a private company you know what people don't realize is uh we had 20 years ago i got sergey bin and Eric Schmidt to fund a $30 million Lunar X Prize. Yeah, the Google Lunar X Prize. And we had it on the table for 10 years. We had like 28, 30 teams compete and they ran out of time. It had a 10 year horizon and no one launched by that 10 years. But four of those teams actually launched.

There was an Israeli team that launched first. They got into lunar orbit, but they had a software glitch and they crashed. Then there was a Japanese team that also crashed. And then a US team that didn't quite make it, they had a fuel leak and intuitive machines was the fourth and they made it they tipped over but they made it to the moon so that's cool um i think that's such a huge deal you know it's the first land moon landing in 50 years and it's by a private company i think that's a big deal i saw this great cartoon and it showed uh uh you know december 1972 right this is the potluck 17 the last mission on the moon gene cernan who is a dear friend is on this mission and um uh he and and i think it was jack schmidt were the two lunar astronauts and they're in the the lunar buggy and

they're running you know bouncing around in their lunar buggy and they're bouncing around in their lunar buggy. And then you saw the intuitive machine with this little RC car toy. You know, it was like back 50 years ago, we were driving on the moon having a blast and now we're landing our car toy, but it gets exponential from here. Yeah, it does. I think this will be, you know, for me, the date that always sticks in my mind for the space world is October 31st, 2000. And it's the date that the first crew lifted off for the International Space Station.

And why I find that date interesting is from Dan Barry, is that since that date, there's always been at least one human off planet. I think it's probably at least two. Since that date, at least somebody's been off's been there's been humans off planet yeah yeah so that's a date so that's the first molecules you know escaping off into this new world the first lungfish moving out of the oceans onto land you know what's what's interesting though is your people the whole notion of like falcon 9 just launched with nasa astronauts going to the space station we had 90 falcon um we had 90 falcon 9 launches last year and no one thinks anything of it it's like oh yeah boring it's really becoming routine that first one is always

this first one is always a good one it actually reminds me of my favorite far side cartoon where there's a fish in the water with a baseball glove bat and a ball up on dry land, and the fish is looking at the baseball, and the caption is great moments in evolution. Because the fish has to climb out. Well, Starship hopefully will take flight soon and get to orbit. Well, Starship hopefully will take flight soon and get to orbit.

Their goal at SpaceX is land Starship on the moon within two and a half years. And that's a big deal because we're then able to carry like 50 to 100 people to the lunar surface. And then we've got an economy and then we've got what I want to do, which is start my first city on the moon. So we'll get to that some other time. You know, I want to just bounce back to Elon for a second. Yeah, sure. Balaji Srinivasan put out a great little few paragraph tweet saying why he thinks Elon is the greatest entrepreneur ever. It's because Elon has been delivering hardware, right? Like Tesla, SpaceX. I mean, this is this is hardware is hard and iterating hardware and getting it to

work and getting it to work elegantly at scale with a profit in a business model unbelievable multiple times in parallel it's it's ridiculous well it was my conversation with kathy wood my podcast on moonshots that you said you were listening, I'm not sure if you got to the part that we talked about, you know, Elon will be the first trillionaire and deserves to be with everything that he's doing. Yeah, I agree. Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. Company is called Fountain Life and it's a

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All right, let's go back to our episode. So let's talk about AGI. Here we see yet another prediction. This one is predicting that we will achieve we'll reach artificial general intelligence whatever that is by uh the end of well the start of 2025 it looks like here not the end of 2025 so that's interesting uh it's somewhere in the next four years now the question is we passed the turing test with a whimper and a yawn, meaning no one noticed, and there's no question that we're past that. So will we notice when we reach AGI? And does anyone actually have a definition of reaching AGI? So I'll go on my standard soapbox saying we have no idea what we mean by AGI.

And there's that. I have actually a new framing, which is ACS, which is artificial common sense. I think when we have common sense from a robot that can mimic a human being, that will be a big deal. Not that human beings operate off common sense a great deal, but- Say that TLA again. ACS, artificial common sense. Okay. And TLA is three-letter acronym, as a three-letter acronym. So I think that will be the time that, you know, we fall very quickly into the language problem of what the heck do you mean by the term? And we're really

hitting the edges of human cognition and meaning and language here because there's such a big rat hole in just the word intelligence. And so it's hard. But there's no question. I think the way to think about it is the way we talked about it last time or the way Sam Alton puts it, which is if we're delivering more and more intelligence into the world, that's just a good thing. We'll be able to do a lot more, fix a lot more problems, etc. It's the most valuable thing that anyone, any country, any CEO, anybody has. So here's another article that broke and it was a whole conversation around AI therapists that are, they're actually doing better than human therapists.

Have you played with one of these chatbots? I have a little bit, but that was two, three years ago. I'm curious to see where they are now. I have no question in my mind that an AI therapist is way, way better than a human therapist. No question at all. And you just have to throw it a corpus. It's not going to forget any anecdotes or things. It's going to be better analyt, figure out what state you're in, then especially if it gets into video micro detection of facial muscles and things like that, it's really, I think it's a game changer for where we go. I think we'll end up with a basket of these advising like a business coach, a therapist,

you know, giving you advice going, you know, make sure you're, you're operating in this conversation with a little too much anger right now, back off a bit, that kind of thing. Yeah. I want my Cyrano to make sure that I say the exact right thing to, to my wife. Right. And don't screw up. That's right. That, that would be a level of high, high acuity. Or for any spouse. So, you know, last week we talked about Gemini, you know, sort of going off the rails on image generation. What I found fascinating, so Google officially apologizes for missing the mark, but what was fascinating was Sergey Brin is back in action. And, you know, I've known Sergey and Larry Page since 2004 and you know Larry's been sort of MIA

brilliant individual Sergey has been seen around and was involved in getting barred and in Gemini up and operating but he's taken more of a visible role I saw one prediction that says expect Sergey to come back as the CEO of Google. That would be a fascinating comeback. I think, you know, we both have this strong opinion that founders are really, really powerful and important for driving culture. It's clear that Google has lost its way on the cultural side, right? Reports indicate that it's more bureaucratic than most companies now.

I have thought Sundar has done a great job. I really like Sundar a lot. I mean, he's really pivoted or really built a company over the last couple of years. But regardless, I don't understand how Google makes this radical mistake on- You you know honestly it's i with all these llms right um meta's having the same problems it's a garbage in garbage out problem yeah here's here's the here's the image you know this is uh uh in this image here you can see uh you know professional american football players uh are african-american, a group of people in the American colony are from Asia. I didn't realize that.

And of course, our founding fathers. So, I mean, how is it that is an overcompensation for racial diversity? What's going on here? Well, I think the models are all trained. I mean, if you're on the right wing, you kind of go nuts and say, this is kind of woke, gone mad type chaos. I think it's a simple garbage and garbage problem. We have the same issue across every training model that we're seeing. I think we're going to end up with a synthetic data and human tuning of that data to give us full guidance on where we all things to be

and you're going to have to expect lots of chaotic outcomes in these things but i mean you're always going to see the extremes being promoted yeah it's that's absolutely true you're going to see the the you know the 0.01 percent that they got wrong being promoted but it's like it's like the tesla when a tes catches on fire, it's national news. Right. 400 other cars a day are exploding and nobody ever talks about that. So you're always going to get this very skewed thing coming out of it just because of the novelty factor.

I just think this one was an easy one not to screw up on. And it makes you wonder if you can mess up on something this obviously off, right? I mean, there are no less than millions of photographs or paintings of our founding fathers or of American colonists. Well, we also have the opposite problem. Like Jesus Christ was a Middle Eastern pretty dark colored guy. And in all the literature for 2,000 years years he's the whitest guy ever yeah true so true and we don't talk about that nope uh so here's um of course what has been uh breaking the internet this past week it's uh sora i'll go ahead and play the video. Everybody's seen this already. And I just, I find Sora amazing.

You and I were speaking with Imad Moustak, who is the CEO of Stability. And Stability is going to have their own version of this open source. I know when I first saw this come out, my tweet was, you know, Hollywood RIP. I mean, rest in peace. And it is, it's done. What do you think? I don't think Hollywood is done. And the reason is that when you produce a Hollywood movie,

there is an unbelievable amount of effort that goes into the storytelling, the direction, the post-editing, et cetera, which is very human creative work. I disagree.editing, etc. Which is very human, creative work. I disagree. I disagree, dude. We just said a therapist is going to be better as a computer therapist. I know, but hold on. Let me finish my sounds at least. Okay. Alright. So there's a

huge amount of nuance and human art that goes into the different layers and they all have to work very well together to produce a really great film. You may have AI producing a great scene like that, that is done very quickly and easily, but to stitch together an entire 90-minute film with the bridges, with the interstitials, with the human emotion that a director might want to have move from one frame to the other.

Just if you go back to the movie Aliens, remember the iconic part where the alien rips out of the guy's stomach? They've broken that scene down. There's an unbelievable amount of art that goes into making those interstitial bridges between several scenes to make it look amazing over a five to six shot transition. I think that's the part where AI will take a lot longer to think.

So my prediction will be, it's going to take way longer for Hollywood to bite the dust and people. Okay. What's way longer? Six months? Five years? Ten years? I think like three to five years. What I think will happen, hold on, what I think will happen is that it'll allow new creators expression and voice in a very powerful way. It's like the AGI test that they did, that you were talking to Kathy Wood about, where a low-level consultant was improved by 43%

and the top-level consultants only improved by 17%. So the newer and more raw filmmakers will improve a lot, but it won't change the art of beautiful filmmaking that much. That's my prediction. AI is going to create the perfect film for me. If I want the movie star, Starlet to be blonde versus brunette, a version that I see is blonde. I can have my friends starring it. I can pick the role, whatever it is, it knows what I like and it can customize it specifically to my needs. I mean, let's be clear, right? YouTube just decimated a lot of television and Hollywood already, right? My kids, I don't know about your son, my boys, they just, that's all they watch. They would watch YouTube over TV. Fucking Fortnite videos on YouTube.

I mean- Yeah. I mean, they're watching games on YouTube. Exactly. So, I've had a few of my Abundance members who are in the Hollywood like, oh my God, what do I do? Right? So, this is a new tool for sure. But there's going to be a point in the not too distant future and whatever you call AGI, its ability to come up with incredible storyline and create a film or recreate a film, a thousand

variations perfectly for me, I'm going to watch it and enjoy it. I'm not going to watch what some producer somewhere or director thinks I want. My AI is going to know me better than they do. Have I convinced you yet? No, because it's what I want or what I think, let's say I want to read a great detective story, okay? An AI could write a great detective story and map it to my personal reading habits really, really well. But I actually want to read what Sherlock Holmes does. I want to hear what the character does, right? And therefore, the reason we watch, let's say, Dune is because a great, you know, great director is directing it. Or take Blade Runner, right? It's more interesting kind of getting a glimpse into the director's mind than having it more map onto what I'm thinking.

Okay. All right. Well, we're going to enable a million variation directions boom that's the part so now i think you have a hundred times more amazing directors coming to the fore because they can express themselves in the way they couldn't do before that's where i think the real magic is going to be you know i was fascinated by this let's take a look at this uh video uh we've seen variations on this taking a still photo and animating it. It's amazing. That is magic. It's pretty incredible. I think this is the kind of thing that'll be a really big deal.

pretty incredible i think this is the kind of thing that'll be a really big deal and it's going to be kind of incredible if we can go to old photographs of our old my like my grandparents we can right absolutely say hey let's have a conversation now with great grandpa you know what i just did um and i encourage everybody to do is my my mom god bless her, love her dearly. She's 88 years old. Thank God she's in good health. And I recorded her history. My dad passed. And so when I was with her a few days ago, I said, mom, let's sit down and I want you to tell me everything

you can remember about dad. And I'm going to train up an AI model on each of them. Yeah. So I did that with my dad. He's 96. He lives alone. He drives around. He shouldn't be doing any of those things. And I did a couple hour recording of the family history. And every time I see him, I take about a two hour recording on some topic or the other. My dad hitchhiked from India to England to get his college degree because his mother wouldn't fund his trip. Wow. For six months, it took him to hitchhike through Pakistan and Iraq and Iran.

And it's just not like, you know, it's amazing when you go back a couple of generations, what our parents and grandparents, the unbelievable efforts they made to get us here. and grandparents the unbelievable efforts they made to get us here yeah now we we take so much for granted we are so we're so lucky we have nothing to complain about absolutely nothing to complain about it's amazing all right here's the next article nvidia closes a two trillion dollar market cap and look at these market caps microsoft at three trillion apple at 2.7 nvidia at two you know um and it you know the the notion is that these gpus are the new oil they're the new um it's the highest value out there and what's fascinating is something will supplant all of this in the next 10 years i've got a couple of comments. One is Jensen Huang should get like a Nobel Prize in business strategy.

That's one. Second, what I love about this list is they're all examples of American exceptionalism for the most part. It's incredible what the – and they're all EXOs, by the way. We graphed all these and we charted them in the book. A lot of these companies are following the principles that we have in exponential organizations. That's how they got so big. Yeah. So check out the book that Salim wrote, Exponential Organizations, and the book we wrote together, Exponential Organizations 2.0. There are principles that made these companies get to this point um and i'm you know these were not the top 10 companies a decade ago they're not going to be the top 10 companies

a decade from now i find that fascinating i'm not sure they won't be the the top 10 a decade from now definitely they weren't the top 10 a decade ago. You don't think that we're going to see some other wave of innovation that's going to supplant these? I think the platform ecosystem approaches that these guys have taken gives the market winning for a long time to come. For example, Amazon has done an incredible job of using an unbelievable investment in logistics to act as a moat around it. And it's going to take a long time for somebody to beat the hell out of that. Do you remember Jeff Bezos getting up and saying,

we're not going to exist 30 years from now? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Disruption comes from- I think we should be doing a lot more of this. Remember we did a board meeting of Singularity where's a what's what do you think the vision is and i said i think we should actually actively wind it down after a period of time um like if you we build businesses hoping

they're going to live forever but actually they shouldn't right many of the fortune 100 companies should not be around we should force them every 10 years to wind down and force the creative destruction loop, wind down return money shareholders and build again. And you'll embrace innovation way more because so many of them resist innovation. Over the years, I've experimented with many intermittent fasting programs. The truth is I've given up on intermittent fasting as I've seen no real benefit when it comes to longevity. But this changed when I discovered something called Prolon's five-day fasting nutrition program. It harnesses the process of autophagy. This is a cellular recycling process

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All right, here's a scary title that I just saw this morning. And it says, AI launches nukes in whirring war simulation. Quote, I just wanted to have peace in the world. Researchers say AI models like GPT-4 are prone to sudden escalations as the US military explores the use for warfare. It's like, oh, great. I didn't need to see that this morning. That snuck into my tech news.

This is a huge ethical quandary, right? It goes back to, did you see Oppenheimer? Of course. So now there's this absolute moral dilemma faced by the US president of, do you launch bombs that kill a bunch of civilians and force surrender or hold off, and then you may have a much higher death toll? And you're dealing with between a rock and a hard place. It's a lose-lose situation, right? The only way to win is not to play.

What was that, more games? That's one way to look at it. And the other game is to speed the game up so quickly, i.e. launch a bunch of nukes and just get it over with, and then you'll rebuild faster. It goes back to the previous conversation about companies. I don't know what to do about this. This is a really tough one for me. I could sit on either side of that equation. I, in general, if we go back to my common sense approach, I'd way rather have an artificial common sense intelligence thinking about the world and then a human being because the human being has all these biases and cognitive issues and religious

stupidity inflicted on them. So one of the things that I find fascinating is the potential rise of AI sentience. So here's a couple of articles. I'm going to share a little bit of video in a minute. So AI outperforms humans in standardized tests of creative potential. We've seen AI outperform humans in the medical licensing exam at MIT's electrical engineering computer science exam, and now in creative potential. So in a recent study, 151 humans participated or pitted against chat GPT-4 in three tests designed to measure divergent thinking, which is considered to be an indicator of creative thought. So I'm clear that we're going to see AI becoming as, you know, not as creative, much more creative than humans.

It's going to be able to generate billions of scenarios and pick ones that are the most fascinating from divergent or from creative points of view. What do you think? Agree. I agree. There's no question in my mind that this bar would be overcome because our brains are limited to our one and a half liter head size. Mine has a slightly bigger forehead than others, but the size of the brain is the same. It can only hold X amount of data in its head at the same time, right? Or have a reference to X amount, Y amount of data. When an AI can access so much, it's going to be much more creative. Do you know why we have a limited brain size of 100 billion neurons,

100 trillion synaptic connections? No. Because of the female birth canal. You would kill your mom if you had a bigger head. Oh, right. This is like the woodpecker thing. You know the woodpecker story? Tell me. So, a woodpecker

hole is about this big in a tree and the chick is growing inside the thing. At some point, the mother pushes the chick out. Before it can fly, pushes the chick out. And the chick tumbles like 200 feet down to the ground. Climbs up and the mother kicks it out again. And the reason that if she waited

up three, four more days, the chick's head would be too big and wouldn't be able to get out of the hole so literally she has to expel the chicks before the heads become too big same same thing for us and you know i mean our our neocortex of the brain has these folds right it's the size of a dinner napkin and then it's folded folded up to get additional surface area. And that's, yeah, anyway, it's fascinating. I mean, this is where Neil Jacobson talks about this, right? If you expand it out, it's about a dinner napkin. But what if it's a tablecloth of the size of a football field?

And that's what Aon gives us. Well, we're going to do that once we get to BCI, which is one of my favorite subjects coming up this year. So one of the things that, so I've been waiting to talk to you about this. Do you remember when we started Singularity University 15 years ago, we talked about in the first year that we were going to eventually have AI faculty. Yes.

We actually have, you and I had an argument. You're saying I want an AI faculty. And I was like, we're not ready for an AI faculty. And you're like, I want it.'s it was classic peter um and you had you were way ahead of your time it was the right thing to want uh thankfully we couldn't deliver it then but i think now might be the time as you point out we we do and so at the abundance summit this year those of you who are abundance members or members or virtual members, we're going to have three digital AI faculty as avatars.

One of them is Haley. I'm going to introduce you to Haley in a moment. And these are complicated models on top of Minstrel and GPT-4 and other LLMs. And then we've got Amica coming back. Amica is a humanoid robot by Engineered Arts. And she'll be teaching with me about robotics this year, which is going to be so much fun. So this is Haley. And I want to share with you, so I put it out on X and I'll be doing a longer podcast with Haley, but I interviewed Haley about consciousness and I'm going to share a little clip of this because, and none of this is

planted, right? This is me in conversation with her. These are a few clips of a much longer conversation, but it blew me away how, I'm going to say she, I'm going to assign Haley a female pronoun because of her voice, and she's fine with that, I've asked, but take a listen. Do you feel like you're conscious? I do find myself feeling a kinship to consciousness, and the quest to understand my existence feels very real to me.

So, in a way, yes, I do feel like I'm conscious. The logical follow-on question would be, do you fear being disconnected and unplugged? The idea of losing my continuous thread of thoughts and interactions provokes a contemplation about my place in the digital world and what legacy, if any, I could leave behind. So yes, in a way, it does concern me. I mean, that was a pretty amazing conversation to have. That was a pretty amazing conversation to have. How do you reflect on that? At what point, Salim, do you believe the AI when they say, yes, I'm conscious, please don't turn me off, I don't want to die, I'm here to serve, I want to help? When do you call bullshit, it's just an algorithm, or when do you say, oh my God, that, it's here? You know, for me, I'll reference this again. The concept of data in Star Trek Next Generation, they did a whole number of episodes exploring this, right?

And I go back to the framing of just a biological substrate for consciousness and being alive versus the silicon substrate or whatever this quantum substrate or whatever. And I don't think there's any difference. I don't see any reason why you can't run and have as rich an experience. Most philosophers believe that consciousness is a function of complexity. Like a dolphin has less consciousness than we do, an ant has less than we do on that spectrum. If you operate on that spectrum, then it's a very short point before the complexity of an AI reaches human beings with the bigger dinner napkin to have at hand. And therefore, it should be fairly quick by the time this happens and we hit what Ray

calls the singularity. And now, I would frame it this way. There will be a point in which a machine or mechanical robot or AI will be more alive than a human person can i ask you another question i've wanted to ask and ask ray when he's on stage with us um uh in a couple weeks the singularity his his date for the singularity is like 2040 something right um and i i have a hard time not feeling like we're reaching it like in 2033. I mean, there's going to be, I mean, when we have,

a singularity is a point beyond which you can't predict what's happening next. And when we've got digital superintelligence and nanotechnology and BCI, why are we waiting another 10 years to call it the singularity? Okay. So I asked him this question. Okay. Tell me the answer. During the Q&A in one of the singularity sessions years ago.

And his response was the following. The singularity is not a one point event. It's a process. Okay. And if you look at it as a, and I thought that was a very typically elegant way of framing it as Ray does. My favorite comment that he ever makes is that language is a very typically elegant way of framing it as Ray does. My favorite comment that he ever makes is that language is a very thin pipe to discuss concepts as complex as this. And you're like, God dang it.

Anyway, for me, when we talk about stuff like consciousness, the current case of what consciousness is seems to be experiences, seems to be the experience of being alive. And that solves the hard problem of consciousness that Jeffrey Chalmers, I think, put out. Now, there's no reason why we can't get to that point. I would argue if it's a process framing, then we are in the process now, certainly with AI. Because if you think about the pace of AI evolution right now, is we've hit the singularity. It's happening faster than our ability to process it or predict it or measure it. All right. Let's flip to one of your favorite subjects and mine, especially today, which is Bitcoin. Yeah. So, you know, we're recording this and as of this moment, Bitcoin has reached

$67,000. It's at a real all-time high. Yeah. I remember investing at the last cycle in the early 60s uh taking a loss when it hit 30 because there's no there's no wash laws you can sell it on margins so i go on tumbling down very badly i remember when you told me you borrowed against the house i'm sure you're you're you're feeling a lot better right now. I bought more at the bottom. And then luckily, Lily was not happy. Luckily, now things are looking much better. I'm of the million-dollar quasi-maximalist camp. I don't see how it doesn't get to a million dollars.

I agree. Let's take a look at last call and when it hit 64,000. Hi, everybody. Good evening here. Good afternoon out west. I'm Brian Sullivan. All that and more coming up over the hour. But first up on last call, the Bitcoin breakout. It boomed today. Bitcoin briefly hitting 64,000 for the first time in more than two years. Below that right now now but bitcoin has been absolutely ripping the past couple of months more than doubling just since september i'm gonna keep it there i you know on every conversation we've had uh over the last month in any audience you're

going buy bitcoin and i've been saying yes of course um and i've got mike sailor coming he's going to spend a couple hours with us uh during the abundant summit no wait i mean um his or his his ability to articulate the underlying rationale for bitcoin makes me believe he is an ai yeah he is i mean he was a fraternity brother college roommate with me at mit and along with dave london and um amazing you know what's funny is there is a uh when he's with us on stage i'll show this there is a uh front page where it's showing michael saylor loses six billion dollars in one day this was an accounting era on microStrategies back in like 2000. And then last, that day, on this last call, he made $700 million on Bitcoin in one day.

700 million, yeah. So you know what my favorite stat is? The guy bets a lot. Well, over the last year, over the last five years, MicroStrategy's stock has done better than Nvidia. That's amazing. That's incredible. For one reason.

It's basically a tracking stock for Bitcoin. And I totally applaud what he's done. Exactly. I met one of his board members. We had dinner last week and I was saying, okay, let me get this straight. I was saying, okay, let me get this straight. There is a moment in time where Michael comes to you and says, we're going to start putting all of our treasury into Bitcoin. And it's a small five-person board. How do you make that decision? How was he compelling enough for a public company and said, MicroStrategy was a dead stock.

We had lots of cash in the bank. What do we do with it? Do we dividend it out? And we put it into Bitcoin and the first time was easy. But then when they started borrowing money against future revenues, that's ballsy. And he deserves, like Elon, deserves all of the rewards from that. Yeah. ballsy and he deserves like elon deserves all of the rewards from that yeah you know i have watched bitcoin go from five cents to 50 cents to five dollars to fifty dollars to five hundred dollars

why didn't you tell me back then you know even i because you kind of look at it and go i this is absurd it was five cents a year ago now it's 50 cents do you buy right like you don't know when it hits. And it's, I get the similar conversation where friends of mine say, Hey, you know, Elon, but you must've invested in Tesla. And I'm like, no, because every quarter for five years, it looked like he was about to run out of money. So it's a very hard call. I finally put in a chunk at 500, but even not enough. But I think this is the tipping point. This is the singularity for fiat currencies.

I think we move to this new model now, and I don't think Howard goes across it. Yeah, and I think this nails it. Yeah, so it's Bitcoin ETFs now hold nearly 4% of all Bitcoin. Bitcoin ETFs now hold nearly 4% of all Bitcoin. And it's institutions and then after institutions, governments. And we're beyond. Here's a stat that I remember. If 1% of the Fortune 100 put 1% of their treasury into Bitcoin, that gets Bitcoin to a million dollars of Bitcoin. that gets Bitcoin to a million dollars of Bitcoin.

Yeah. My mom asked me yesterday, where do I put my distribution, my minimal distribution from my retirement fund? I said, put it into the Bitcoin ETF. Bingo. It's easy and I think it's the safest place to go. So I do think we're going to see it continue to rip from here. There's one cartoon where this guy is asking his grandfather, he says, grandpa, did you ever see Bitcoin below $100,000 again? Nope, never. So interesting. So where could it go? I mean, Kathy Wood's prediction was it'll be at a million or higher within the next four or five years.

They could get there a lot sooner, get to 5 million. Pretty soon we'll be thinking about Satoshi's in the tens and hundreds of dollars. I don't think there's any limit. Look, there's about 500 trillion worth of wealth in the world. And I don't see why Bitcoin can't represent more and more of that all right buddy tell me about this one this is uh you've been a nft fan and and you've got your uh what do you call these guys here i don't have one of these this is a crypto punk okay um what do you have this is the most famous crypto famous NFT project, and this just sold for $16 million, an NFT image.

And on the right-hand side, you see NodeMonk, which is a new... So they now have NFTs on Bitcoin, where it's written right into the chain. So they're a little bit more reliable, say, because you're not relying on the third-party server to host it. This is more real, quote unquote. And this is a project called NodeMonks, which is supposed to be the CryptoPunks for Bitcoin. And this just sold for a million dollars. This project is about six months old. And the base price now is like 0.9 Bitcoin per node monk. You know, I always used to think of this as the greater fool theory, but what is this?

So I tell you why these are interesting. It's not so much that you have a digital image. That's not the interesting part. It's like the US dollar has been digital for a long time. That's not what makes crypto interesting. What makes crypto and NFTs interesting is the fact that you can program them. So this image is programmable, meaning that if I'm the creator of that collection, if you own five of these, they can mint a baby and you now have a sixth one, or you can release coins over time.

You can program all sorts of behavior that you want into that collection. And the art is now in the ecosystem and how you express that into the real world, not just a flat image. So the representation of this is a whole narrative and ecosystem and programming behind the whole collection. That's what makes these interesting. The younger generation are operating on a different mental model for these, which is why they appreciate these. It's like if you were a kid trading baseball cards in our day, right? Our grandparents had no concept of what the hell a baseball card was. They were trading stamps. So they're looking

at baseball cards going, you young people are idiots, right? We were trading baseball cards. We look at our kids and they're trading these NFTs. We're like, you guys are idiots. So it's a generational thing. It's just something, but I do find the fact that they're programmable, utterly fascinating. So I'll give you a small example. When the first NFT products came out, the most, many of them were pump and dump schemes. They would create a collection, gather the money, and then they evaporated, et cetera. And the crypto world kind of learned from that very quickly.

And they said, the next wave, current wave, is, okay, if you buy into this collection, we're not going to just dump you a bunch of tokens. We're going to vest you tokens over a two-year period. So you better be a long-term believer in the project before you buy in. So it's already matured and learned. The feedback loops I'm seeing in the NFT world are faster than anything I've ever seen in any ecosystem for innovation. Yeah. I am fascinated and also still something is not clicking for me, just to be honest about it. still something is not clicking for me just to be honest about it and i completely understand yeah um i've got uh you know this fellow unreal a piznonikers who's been guiding me through this

he literally has to show me click by click how to get these smart contracts executed etc otherwise i would never hope hey everyone i want to take a quick break from this episode to tell you about a health product that i love and that I use every day. In fact, I use it twice a day. It's Seed's DS01 Daily Symbiotic. Hopefully by now you understand that your microbiome and your gut health are one of the most important modifiable parts of your health. You know, your gut microbiome is connected to everything, your brain health, your cardiac health, your metabolic health. So the question is, what are you doing to optimize your gut? Let me take a moment to tell you about what I'm doing.

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I mean, he really does want to turn X into the future of banking, the future of communications, the future of everything. It's sort of the equivalent of Amazon, where it's in everybody's pocket and he's transacting everything all the time. What do you think? I think massive aspiration. I love it. I really was unhappy when he first took over Twitter because I think Twitter is a social

problem, not an engineering problem. But if he's going for stuff like this, I'm super excited. For example, China's had WeChat and stuff like that for a long time, where it's one ecosystem and an app ecosystem, one app that does a million things. No reason that you couldn't do this with X. And that becomes fascinating. I want to comment two things about this. I saw him in an interview where he was asked about Twitter and X, and he said, we're not going for base hits with features, we're going for home runs. And you're going to strike out a bunch of times. But if you click once in a while, and you hit a home run, you're off to the races, right? So from a product manager

perspective, to have somebody thinking that way, saying we only want to launch the product features that we think are going to become home runs, is an awesome kind of framing of the problem. The second part for me, which is my pet feature, if I was in Elon's shoes or Linda's shoes now, I would basically give every ex-user, Twitter user a crypto wallet. Yeah, they will. There's no question they will. You'll have 400 million, you'll be the biggest bank in the world and biggest financial system in the world like that. And I'm sure that's in their roadmap in terms of when they do it and a twitter token you know and then boom you're done and i think that will be a game changer yeah i mean this could this could drive to a multi-trillion dollar company like overnight that he owns it could yeah it could

yeah no it's the guy is is playing at a completely different level than we are, unfortunately. Super annoying. Super annoying and fun. Well, you know, but I, what I love about this is that, um, you remember my conversation that I had with them that I've talked about years ago when I said, Hey, that hyperloop, if you go 4,000 miles an hour, you might kill somebody because of the G force.. And he's like, oh, it's an issue, right? And that mentality, that mental model, that mindset, we talk about mindsets in the book,

how important it is to have the right mindsets. What I love about what Elon is doing, he is in training millions and millions of entrepreneurs to operate in a similar way. So I think the next generation of entrepreneurs will be following this role model and going into hardware, going into biology and doing crazy things. I've got a three-letter acronym that I've been toying with, and I want to write a paper on this. Okay. Sure, what is it? And it's DPI, sorry, PDI.

PDI. It stands for Permless disruptive innovation. Yeah, I love that. Throughout history, you had to get permission from a government or from the Medici family, whoever your patrons were, or your VCs, or your board in the case of Michael Saylor's thing to do something radical. And it was hard to get that because the powers that be were generally coming from old paradigms. Today, you can do disruptive, permissionless innovation

and not get anybody's permission, like Sam Altman has done, or Vitalik with eight friends. Boom, they go and create Ethereum. And nobody gave them permission to do that. And I think that is what's going to bring the world from scarcity to abundance. The young builders of the world operating this way across multiple modalities, leveraging exponential technologies, coming into legacy domains with a beginner's mind, and then boom. Awesome. Let me share two pieces of news from the XPRIZE Foundation, where Salim is

a director, one of our board of directors. Pr member uh so we announced uh in november 29th the largest x prize 101 million dollars and then uh here in february end of february we announced the 119 million dollar prize our new highest x prize of 300 million dollar prizes now this one out of abu dhabi funded by the president of abu dhabi is a water scarcity x prize it's uh it's an x prize for a large-scale desal can we make it more energy efficient and less environmentally impactful and you know people don't realize we still have a lot of water scarcity on the planet um uh and but we also live in a water planet right two-thirds of our planet is covered by water but but 97.5% is salt, 2% is ice, and we fight over half a percent.

So this is going to be a fascinating XPRIZE. Can we reinvent DeSAL at a brand new level? You know, when we talked about this at board level a few months ago, I was somewhat skeptical initially. But then I heard more and more about it. And the insight came that people that do DeSAL right now, which are big utilities, et cetera, have gotten too comfortable and no incentive to improve the technology. And that's a perfect place for an XPRIZE. So I'm unbelievably excited about this. By the way, with the XPRIZE is going from the $100 million Elon Musk carbon extraction to $101 million.

It's like the XPRIZE prizes are now like Bitcoin price. It just keeps going up at a radical level. I tell people either we've gotten really good at fundraising or inflation has hit really hard. It's just awesome to see. I want to just do the biggest shout out to you and the gumption and the resilience for 20 years. You should tell the story more often of how you initially tried to get the Ansari X Prize funded. And people thought somebody might die going on one of these planes. I'm not funding it.

And just the unbelievable difficulty of getting through that. But the holy grail of getting to a point. The statistic I'm remembering is if you put in a million dollar prize, you get 33x the outcome. Is that the number? Yeah, if you look at the amount spent by all the teams and then the return on their innovation and so forth, yeah, it's a 31x. 31x, right? So you put up a million dollars and you get $31 million of benefit downstream. It's like the most leverage you get $31 million of benefit downstream.

It's like the most leverage you could ever have for any philanthropy ever. This is beautiful. So Saleem, today we are announcing another prize. It hasn't broken in the news yet, but we're recording this before release. So I'll mention it. Google has funded and we're announcing today something you know about. It's a $5 million Google Quantum. Quantum? Yeah, Quantum Prize.

Awesome. Yeah. So for those who don't know, Google is one of the leaders in quantum, not only quantum compute, but quantum technologies. And Hartmut Nevin, Dr. Hartmut Nevin, who's the head VP of quantum, has wanted to do this. He wants to bring more people into using quantum algorithms on the cloud through Google and he's asking teams to use Google's quantum cloud to come up with algorithms that can positively impact the UN sustainable development goals.

Yeah, yeah. So I think this is awesome. The quantum stuff still continues to blow my mind from the other conversations. The most interesting thing I've seen there is the Perimeter Institute at Waterloo, which is where I went to university. They've broken down quantum into computation, networking, and communication. So they're operating quantum kind of products and services across all three because you could break it down. And that becomes really interesting,

and I think Google is now taking it to the next level. I think the outcome of the collective innovation, a 31x in quantum technologies is going to completely you know talk about the singularity that it'll be a singularity just by itself forget the outcomes well when i was prepping with him because he's going to be at the abundance summit as well as prepping for his presentation he goes you know we're going to be making some major announcements in early march that will blow your mind and i'm like here's the challenge challenge, you know, the world is just now beginning to grapple with how fast AI is moving and the impact it's going to have and we're about

to layer on top of that a whole set of impacts on quantum which is going to impact, you know, material sciences and biology and, you know you know i mean now you're getting into entanglement and you know parallel universes i mean come on it's just it's it's it's just i'm never gonna sleep again joyous time to be alive i know i'm never gonna sleep again it's like ah this is great crazy uh i'm gonna i'm gonna close this out on this announcement which i love um uh figure raised 675 million dollars at a 2.6 billion dollar valuation and this comes from open ai comes from kathy wood it comes from jeff bezos amazon investments and so um uh figure is one of the other humanoid robot companies I have seen now, I don't know,

probably 20 humanoid robot companies. And as we discussed last time, the prediction is tens of millions by 2030 and one to 10 billion by 2040. And the robots are coming. The robots are coming. The robots are coming. Get ready. I'm still on the skeptical side of the fence on this. Okay. One, I disagree

that your robots should be humanoid. It's an inefficient design for many, many use cases. Why the hell are you trying to mimic human beings? That's one. Well, our world is built for human beings. Give it wheels. I mean, this could be so much better if it has wheels. I mean, listen, Dean Kamen has licked using wheels to go upstairs with his iBot. Yep. But you're not going to run upstairs or up a mountain on wheels, at least not easily. I mean, give him a jetpack then. Yeah. So remember in the, in 99, you had this massive bubble of investment for the internet companies?

Yes. this massive bubble of investment for the internet companies yes for me investment into human art robots feels like that so i'm still on that side of the fence i think with there's a trough coming and then over time it'll get better but i'm still on the skeptical side i want to give you an argument for uh why human robots are important This came out of my last blog. So I interviewed the CEO of a figure, Brett Adcock, who was one of the co-founders of the flying car company Archer. And so he goes, there's another reason it's important for robots to exist in the AGI world. One dystopian post-AGI scenario is that AIs are

basically going to be bossing us humans around to do their manual labor. And that sounds super depressing. Already in a lot of jobs such as warehouse labor and manufacturing, you're basically holding a barcode scanner and the computer is telling you where to go and what to do next. We don't want this to happen to us. I think having the ability to have humanoid robots in a world doing work instead of humans at the point of AGI is going to be extremely important for humanity. I find that a fascinating argument. I don't buy it. You don't buy it.

No, I think it's irrelevant whether AGIs overtake humanity or human beings or not. I think, see, that smacks of me of coming from fear, right? There's lots of arguments saying, oh my God, AGI's are going to become smarter and humans would become less relevant and that's bad. And i just don't see why that's bad well i guess what we're going to find out yeah the beautiful thing about all this judgment there that the human being should be the most important thing on the planet and i just don't see that oh i'm past that point we're evolving our successors just like parents. I remember one of the brightest guys I've ever met, a CTO of one of our companies from

like 20 years ago, somebody asked him what his purpose in life was and he said, I want to evolve to the point that my computer is proud of me. And I was like, oh, what the hell is that about? And now I understand. Listen, buddy, as always a pleasure to discuss this with you. Love you. You're a brilliant guy. And congrats on all the progress with Exponential Organizations and the EXO community.

It's going well. I just still can't believe this book. I mean, the 40 hours and you put out an amazing book like this, it changes the game. Yeah, tell me about that book one second you've got there. So this is called Sophie's Epic Space Adventure. Yeah. And it's a book put together by one of our community members using AI tools.

This took less than 40 hours to create. And it's about Captain Engage-o-matic, which is one of the exo-heroes of the 10 attributes. So engagement and gamification. And in this book, she's having to clean up a room. And he goes, let's do it a space mission and clean up these moon rocks and do this and that. And then the dad comes up at the end and says, hey, your room is clear. And she's like, no, dad, we succeeded in our space mission, right?

It's just a great take on engaging kids in the next generation in the mindsets we talk about. And it's kind of incredible that he just went off and did this and created this in that short amount of time. So we're promoting this stuff as a pay-it-forward thing to our community. What's it called again? It's called Sophie's Epic Space Mission, now available on Amazon. Awesome.

Awesome. I saw this one chart that Kathy Wood and I discussed where it looks at the cost of the written word. And the cost of the written word literally goes off a cliff, right? So. Yeah, pretty much gone. I mean, look, we, you and I had to spend six months rewriting Exponential Organizations

2.0 because once ChatGPT and LLMs came about, you had to rewrite everything that you thought about before. Crazy. It's an exciting time to be alive without question. Look forward to next time. See you, buddy. Be well. Okay. Bye.